We have no wish whatever to make any imputation against the motives of the brave men who have withstood the thunders of the Vatican, and who in some cases have been professionally ruined by their courageous avowal of their opinions.  Perhaps none but a Catholic priest can understand how great the sacrifice is when one in his position breaks away from the authority of those who speak in the name of the Church, and deliberately incurs the charge, still so terrible in Catholic ears, of being a heretic and a teacher of heresy.  Not one man in twenty would dare to face the storm of obloquy, hatred, and calumny which is always ready to fall on the head of a heretical priest.  The Encyclical indicates the measures which are to be taken officially against Modernists.  Pius X ordains that all the young professors suspected of Modernism are to be driven from their chairs in the seminaries; that infected books are to be condemned indiscriminately, even though they may have received an imprimatur; that a committee of censors is to be established in every diocese for the revision of books; that meetings of liberal priests or laymen are to be forbidden; that every diocese is to have a vigilance committee to discover and inform against Modernists; and that young clerical Modernists are to be put ‘in the lowest places,’ and held up to the contempt of their more orthodox or obsequious comrades.  But this persecution is as nothing compared with the crushing condemnation with which the religious world, which is his only world, visits this kind of contumacy; the loss of friendships, the grief and shame of loved relatives, and the haunting dread that an authority so august as that which has condemned him cannot have spoken in vain.  Assuredly all lovers of truth must do homage to the courage and self-sacrifice of these men.  The doubt which may be reasonably felt and expressed as to the consistency of their attitude reflects no discredit on them personally.  Nevertheless, the alternative must be faced, that a ‘modernised’ Catholicism must either descend to deliberate quackery, or proclaim that the bank from which the main part of her revenues is derived has stopped payment.

What will be the end of the struggle, and in what condition will it leave the greatest Church in Christendom?  There are some who think that the Church will grow tired of the attitude of Canute, and will retreat to the chair which Modernism proffers, well above high-water mark.  But the policy of Rome has never been concession, but repression, even at the cost of alienating large bodies of her supporters; and we believe that in the present instance, as on former occasions, the Vatican will continue to proscribe Modernism until the movement within her body is crushed.  She can hardly do otherwise, for the alternative offered is not a gradual reform of her dogmas, but a sweeping revolution.  This we have made abundantly clear by quotations from the Modernists themselves.  If the Vatican once